In an effort to ensure a world-class experience, we’ve decided that the 2010 LA Bike Tour will not be held Marathon morning, as it historically has been. We’ll share further details once they’re available and look forward to hosting a great bike event later next year.

As someone who’s made an annual tradition of the Bike Tour since its inception in 1995, I have to say I’m saddened that the people running the marathon — still in their rookie year — would just up and shove aside an event that’s consistently brought out 10,000-plus cyclists each year onto the streets of a bike-unfriendly city where you’re lucky to see a few dozen in a day.

But as I await their alleged further details I’m going to cross my fingers and do my best to be heartened by the fact that there seems to be some consideration being given to bringing the Bike Tour out from the eclipsing shadow of the marathon and grow it into its own “world class” event.

Of course it may just be smoke they’re blowing — especially when stuff starts getting figured out like the costs and logistics and inevitable citizen outrage at the closing off of a course not just once in 2010 but twice. But I’ll try to give the Bike Tour (dis)organizers the benefit of the doubt. And in the end if they end up pulling the plug, I’ll just show up at the Dodger Stadium startline at 5 a.m. on race day and keep my tradition going by riding it to the sea my own damn self and anyone else who might wanna join me.

After the jump is the timelapse vid of this year’s ride.

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3 responses to L.A. Marathon Kicks Bike Tour To A Date To Be Determined

That’s sad. Though I LOVE cycling, I never did or wanted to do the LA Bike Tour. But 10,000 people can’t be wrong. A lot of people are going to be upset, and I don’t think this will be the last word on this.

Me thinks it may be a golden opportunity for a Midnight Ridazz / Morning Ridazz ride to the sea on March 21st…

I can imagine the insane logistics of a point-to-point Stadium-to-the-Sea route like the marathon will have… it’ll be difficult enough shuttling runners to one end or the other, but at least they won’t have to worry about shuttling the bicycles.

And if they do a completely different looped route for the bicycles… well, if it’s a completely different route, then there’s not much point in staging it on the same day, right? It just makes for double the road closures for an event that half the city already complains about.

The Pasadena Marathon (on Feb 21, 2010) will have a bike tour. So will the Long Beach Marathon on Oct 11, 2009. And both of those have better public transportation options than the Stadium-to-the-Sea route, should you want to take advantage of that.

Robb, I’d humbly counter that the point-to-point marathon route from Universal City to downtown in both 2007 and 2008 included bike tours in the event whose logistics were decidedly not insane. Sure, marathon participants benefited both those years with a route whose start and end points were near the Red Line and yeah the stadium-sea route is strongly lacking in a mass-transit component, but the bike tour was run along a route that included part of the marathon course and part its own and it all worked out fine.

In both 2007 and 2008 the bike tour began in Exposition Park, and traversed some of the marathon course backward first to Boyle Heights then through downtown and across to Koreatown before working its way back to Exposition Park on a separate route.